The Lewis Chessmen, Up Close

Today, for the first time, I got to see some of the magnificent Lewis
chess pieces first-hand, in Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland. I
wrote about them in my book The
Immortal Game (excerpt below) but until today had not yet seen them
in person. Most of them usually reside at the British Museum in London.

They are 78 ﬁgurines, comprising four
not-quite-complete chess sets, hand-carved from walrus tusk and whale
teeth near Trondheim, Norway around 1150, but discovered seven hundred
miles away in 1831 in the Bay of Uig on the Scottish Isle of Lewis.

They are spectacular.

Excerpt from The Immortal Game

Despite
appearances to the contrary, the rolling, uneven dunes on the west
coast of the Isle of Lewis, about ﬁfty miles west of the Scottish
mainland, are not ancient burial mounds. They're natural formations,
conﬁgured over thousands of years by the shifting water table and the
terriﬁc sea winds howling off the Atlantic.

But the dunes do have
their powerful secrets, as an unsuspecting is¬land peasant learned one
day in the spring of 1831. At the base of a ﬁfteen-foot sandbank near
the south shore of the Bay of Uig, the inte¬rior was somehow exposed,
and with it a nearly seven-hundred-year-old crypt. Our unwitting
archaeologist stumbled into an ancient and cramped drystone room, six
feet or so long and shaped like a beehive, with ashes strewn on the
ﬂoor. The tiny room was ﬁlled, impossibly, with dozens of shrunken
people: tiny lifelike statuettes, three to four and a half inches high,
some stained beet-red and the rest left a natural off-white. The long
hair, contoured faces, and proportionate bodies were eerily vivid, even
animated, with wide-eyed, expectant expressions, battle-ready stances,
and a full complement of medieval combat equipment and apparel.
Hand-carved from walrus tusk and whale teeth, they wore tiny crowns,
mitres, and helmets; held miniature swords, shields, spears, and
bishop's crosiers; some rode warhorses.

They were chess pieces, a
total of seventy-eight ﬁgurines comprising four not-quite-complete
sets:

• eight Kings (complete)

• eight Queens (complete)

• sixteen Bishops (complete)

• ﬁfteen Knights (one
missing)

• twelve Warders (as Rooks, four missing)

•
nineteen Pawns (forty-ﬁve missing)

No one living at the time had
ever seen anything like them. The ornamentation had a medieval gothic
quality that lent the pieces an ancient and even mythic aura. Experts
pronounced them Scandinavian, probably mid-twelfth century, probably
carved near the Norwegian capital Trondheim some seven hundred miles
away by sea, where a drawing of a strikingly similar chess Queen was
later discovered. Norway was a long way off, but the link did make
historical sense. The Isle of Lewis had been politically subject to the
Kingdom of Norway up to 1266, and the local bishop held allegiance to
the powerful Archbishop of Trondheim.

These weren't nearly the
oldest chessmen discovered--1150 put them somewhere in the middle of the
chess chronology. But their abun¬dance, origins, artistry, and superb
condition made them among the most important cache of ancient pieces yet
found. The modestly en¬dowed Society of Antiquaries of Scotland tried
immediately to buy them for display in Edinburgh, but before they could
raise the funds, bigger ﬁsh swam in. A wealthy Scottish collector
somehow plundered eleven of them for his private collection, and the
British Museum in London bought the rest--sixty-seven pieces for eighty
guineas (equivalent to £3,000 or roughly U.S. $5,000 in today's
currency).

The museum immediately recognized not only the
pieces' unique importance in the history of chess, but more importantly
their profoundly palpable connection to life in the Middle Ages. "There
are not in the museum any objects so interesting to a native Antiquary
as the objects now offered to the trustees," wrote the museum's keeper
of antiquities, Edward Hawkins, as he presented the pieces for the ﬁrst
time. The Lewis Chessmen were a priceless link to the past, and would
become a signature draw at the museum.

"When you look at them,"
suggests curator Irving Finkel, "kneel down or crouch in such a way that
you can look through the glass straight into their faces and look them
in the eye. You will see human beings across the passage of time. They
have a remarkable quality. They speak to you."

What do they say?
The story of how chess migrated from the Golden Gate Palace in Baghdad
to the remote Isle of Lewis, and how the pieces morphed from abstracted
Persian-Indian war ﬁgurines to evocative European Christian war
ﬁgurines, is an epic that underscores the enormous transfer of culture
and knowledge in the Middle Ages from the East to the West. It also
heralds an important shift in chess's role as a thought tool. In
medieval Europe, chess was used less to con¬vey abstract ideas and more
as a mirror for individuals to examine their own roles in society. As
Europe developed a new code of social morality, chess helped society
understand its new identity.

David Shenk is a writer on genetics, talent and intelligence. He is the author of Data Smog, The Forgetting, and most recently, The Genius In All of Us. More

David Shenk is the author of six books, including Data Smog ("indispensable"—The New York Times), The Immortal Game ("superb"—The Wall Street Journal), and the bestselling The Forgetting ("a remarkable addition to the literature of the science of the mind."—The Los Angeles Times ). He has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and National Public Radio. Shenk's work inspired the Emmy-award winning PBS documentary The Forgetting and was featured in the Oscar-nominated feature Away From Her. His latest book, The Genius In All Of Us, was published in March 2010. Shenk has advised the President's Council on Bioethics and is a popular speaker. Click here to follow him on Twitter.